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The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) was the first American overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 sparked the interest of United States in expansion to the west coast. A few weeks after the purchase, United States President Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of western expansion, had U.S. Congress appropriate $2500, "to send intelligent officers with ten or twelve men, to explore even to the western ocean". They were to study the Indian tribes, botany, geology, Western Terrain and wildlife in the region, as well as evaluate the potential interference of British and French-Canadian hunters and trappers who were already well established in the area. The expedition was not the first to cross North America, but was roughly a decade after the expedition of Alexander Mackenzie, the first European to cross North America by land north of Mexico, in 1793.
Jefferson selected Captain Meriwether Lewis to lead the Lewis and Clark expedition, afterwards known as the Corps of Discovery; Lewis selected William Clark as his partner. Due to bureaucratic delays in the US Army, Clark officially only held the rank of Second Lieutenant at the time, but Lewis concealed this from the men and shared the leadership of the expedition, always referring to Clark as "Captain"
The group, consisting of 33 members of the lewis and clark expedition including Clark's black slave York, departed from Camp Dubois and began their historic journey on May 14, 1804. They soon met-up with Lewis in Saint Charles, Missouri and the approximately forty men followed the Missouri River westward. On August 20, 1804 The Corps of Discovery suffered its first and only death when Sergeant Charles Floyd died, apparently from acute appendicitis. In the winter of 1804-1805 they wintered at Fort Mandan. The Shoshone/Hidatsa native woman Sacagawea joined the group from there and guided them westward.
The Lewis and Clark expedition followed the Missouri through what is now Kansas City, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska, crossed the Rocky Mountains and descended by the Clearwater River, the Snake River, and the Columbia River through what is now Portland, Oregon until they reached the Pacific Ocean in the December of 1805. Lewis had written in his journal, "Ocean in view. Oh! The Joy". By that time the Lewis and Clark expedition faced its second bitter winter during the trip, so the group decided to vote on whether to camp on the north or south side of the Columbia River. That was a "Real American Moment", for York, who was a slave, and Sacagawea, who was an Indian and a woman, voted along with the rest of the men of the party. The party agreed to camp on the south side of the river, building Fort Clatsop as their winter quarters. While wintering at the fort, the men prepared for the trip home by boiling salt from the ocean, hunting elk and other wildlife. Mostly they just endured the persistent rain.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lewis and Clark Expedition"